Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have played a big part in accelerating digital transformation since COVID-19, with companies moving business processes toward a smarter and data-driven future. AI and ML allow organizations to streamline and automate essential functions and improve efficiency.

According to an estimation by McKinsey, AI could potentially deliver an additional economic output of around $13 trillion by 2030, boosting global GDP by about 1.2 percent yearly. The Middle East is expected to accrue US$320 billion in benefits from AI by 2030, and the annual growth in the contribution of AI is expec

Ravi Saraogi, Co-founder and President – Uniphore APAC

ted to range between 20-34% per year, according to PwC’s report The potential impact of AI in the Middle East.

Customer experience (CX) is one area that can benefit from AI-powered tools.

Improving CX With Better Technologies

Organizations can leverage technologies such as omnichannel, AI-driven intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) to free up time for human agents and allow them to focus on higher-level tasks starting at the front office. This form of automation removes a layer of repetitive, lower-level tasks and provides a quick and efficient way for customers to find the correct department or be led towards the information they require to complete their inquiry.

Conversational AI

Conversational AI solution provides contact center employees with increased information flow during a call. The platform can present them with real-time information relevant to the conversation they are having with their customer. This empowers better customer service and enriches the overall service experience.

An AI-driven platform can co-pilot the call, and assist contact center employees with advanced capabilities such as real-time insights and guidance, suggestions for added value, and real-time automation of repetitive tasks. AI-driven tools can also pick up on the tone of a customer’s voice and ascertain their mood – alerting supervisors if the call needs escalation. Such features can help build detailed customer personas, thus playing a pivotal role in improving customer experience.

Data Analysis and Capture

The organization can capture much data for every call that comes into a contact center. Instead of siphoning that information into storage and potentially reducing its potential and risk it becoming siloed, organizations can apply it directly to their customer experience platform, further enriching the knowledge it holds. This allows AI-led technology to analyze and detect behavior patterns, make sense of a customer’s preferences, uncover previously hidden relations between the customer and products or services, and systematize the data on that customer. This data and knowledge can make every customer journey more comprehensible for contact center agents and empower them to perform the best possible job for every customer interaction.

The Course to Success

Unlocking business value by deploying these technologies requires strategic thinking and a clear roadmap. The process involves an evaluation of how best to integrate smarter technologies into contact centers.

With the transition to a more digital economy, traditional enterprises —financial services, telecommunications, insurance, or e-commerce — will need to change their business models accordingly. Business success is built on customers and providing better outcomes. Smarter customer experience tools will go a long way towards supporting that success

Nearly 20 percent of the sales in retail account for e-commerce and it is projected to grow by 25 percent in 2025, which is $11 trillion in five years. No dispute that e-commerce is becoming an indispensable part of retailing with impending digitization and technological advancements in the industry. Today, there is a scope for every retailer or product manufacturer to start their e-commerce venture.

Nonetheless, the desirable market share and positioning of e-commerce companies – estimated 12 million across the globe – is obscure next to the dominant players, such as Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, Rakuten, etc. Since co-existence is not well appreciated in the business world, the only choice is to keep the competitive spirits high no matter whether you are a newcomer or an established enterprise.

Discuss Customer Experience, Not Pricing

Experts say, “to stand up against the competition, e-commerce enterprises should enhance customer experience instead of reducing the product prices from reasonable levels. However, dynamic pricing should be appreciated.” Most e-commerce companies are presumably paying high costs for infrastructure, logistics, IT, and payment services. Reducing the margins of revenue not only invites failure but also ceases their potential for futuristic investments.

If surveys are reliable, the e-tail business is growing at a record pace and a large chunk of buyers are added every year with bigger buying potential and bargaining power. According to Statista.com, “as internet access and adoption are rapidly increasing worldwide, the number of digital buyers keeps climbing every year. In 2020, over two billion people purchased goods or services online, and during the same year, e-retail sales surpassed 4.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide.”

These trends simply suggest that organizations should work on a war footing and focus on improving investments in user experience – starting from product search to delivery.

Easy Search, Filtering, and Fast Delivery

For an e-commerce customer, the experience starts from the moment she or he chooses to open an e-commerce portal or a mobile app, not to mention that m-commerce has about 73 percent market share. So, the e-commerce companies should aim to win the foremost battle of listing products and convenient filtering and navigation features based on the keyword input. Voice-based searches and image scans are add-on features in the latest platforms.

The caliber of an e-commerce business is put to the test, time and again, in the delivery of products to customers. Every customer will seek fast and on-time delivery of products even if it has to import from another country. Therefore, the establishment of logistics infrastructures (incl. warehousing, shipping, and handling) should be based on a well-thought-out plan – the same applied to the return of products. As multiple agents are involved in this process, efficient coordination is needed; failing which, is nothing lesser than losing a customer.

Customer Retention is More Important Than Ever

Loyalty isn’t an impressive term any longer in free-market societies and even loyal customers should be ideally labeled as regular or returning customers. Regular customers help a business thrive even if that is small in number. Experience of buying a quality product and its smooth delivery influences a buyer to revisit the portal whenever the need arises. That underlines the importance of what types of products are to be listed and how efficiently they have to be presented to potential customers.

Smartphones overwhelmingly impact the buying practices of customers as they give customers extremely personalized experiences of using shopping apps. From product comparison to live tracking, everything is easily possible in shopping apps. Apart from that, payments are flexible through smartphones if that is done from debit/credit cards and unified payment interface (UPI) apps.

With efficient tracking and analysis of user data, the marketing teams can reach customers uniquely in terms of running customized ads, offering exclusive prices, sending push notifications on viewed or cart items, etc.

Reports said, the mandate of Apple, along with iOS 14.5, raised the eyebrows of marketers as it categorically states that apps must show their users a pop-up and track them only if they decide to “opt-in,” or to “allow tracking.” It appears that tailored cross-platform advertisement campaigns are not possible anymore as Apple wishes to bring in another layer of safety net for user data.

When you look on the bright side of it, online shoppers’ data needs to be safeguarded, and so does their buying behavior. Users’ data (combining PII) are valuable beyond becoming dashboard insights in a third-party application. Anyways, marketing professionals should figure out more creative concepts to retain customers.

AI, Data Analytics, and Automation

AI-powered tools are gearing success in several areas, such as chatbot customer support, product suggestions, logistic handling, delivery-process notifications, etc. In addition, e-commerce companies can invest further to analyze data (excluding PII) to arrive at solid conclusions about the buyers’ interests, nature of buying, payment patterns, etc. Based on these parameters, they can persuade customers to buy relevant items at exclusive pricing.

Similarly, e-commerce ventures, especially warehouse and logistic companies, are attempting to automate their operations from packaging to consignment shipping with shared benefits, such as increased profit, elevated reputation, reduce workforce, quick process completion, etc. However, the significant questions are: Is it cost-effective? Who can afford to have it?

The incurring cost to e-commerce business is based on numerous levels including staffing, platform, cloud solutions, infrastructure, and logistics. Not all e-commerce businesses can afford to handle all of them within their organization but can get them on lease or contract.

We often come across marketplaces that simply operate e-commerce websites, take care of staffing, install IT systems, and rely on suppliers, external warehouses, and logistics service providers to handle the rest. Whereas large e-commerce enterprises (i.e., Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, etc.) handle much of the tasks within the organization and outsource some for convenience. Such e-commerce companies would be dominating the industry and tactically superior to others.

Shopify Disruption: It is an e-commerce platform that helps customers, predominantly independent retailers, build online shops quickly. Shopify serves 1.7 million merchants globally.

Immersive technologies (AR and VR) are expected to involve in the e-commerce sector as they promise to provide customers with a virtual experience or preview of the product in their environments.

Conclusion

Commercial transactions on the internet would bring significant changes in the retail industry besides transforming economies worldwide. With extensive sourcing, storage, warehouse, and shipping potential besides investments, some enterprises would rule the market while others strive to succeed. One thing is certain, each of them should consistently improve and enhance the customer experience in their platform. Because that can make the real difference!

How can Shipsy be a competent partner for the logistic operations of SMEs and large enterprises?

Regardless of size, an enterprise can opt for Shipsy’s AI-powered logistics management platform to automate their export operations, rate procurement operations, handling of large orders, documentation processes, and track bulk shipments in real-time.

In both domestic and cross-border shipping, we empower customers to reduce their freight costs by up to 10 percent through enhanced route planning of shipments and intelligent procurement processes. Shipsy also helps businesses build sustainable supply chain operations by reducing miles traveled, shrinking empty miles, reducing trip volumes, and enabling enterprises to monitor CO2 emissions actively across air, water and land.

We ensure end-to-end granular-level visibility of goods and parcel movement to empower businesses to drive accurate decision making, identify cost optimization pockets, mitigate transportation risks, boost compliance and enhance customer experience.

What are the industry verticals that Shipsy is focusing on?

The Shipsy platform empowers global businesses across industries to optimize, automate, track and simplify end-to-end logistics and supply chain operations. Some of our customers include the second-largest tire manufacturer, the largest petrochemical company, a global Fortune 100 retailer, a leading steel manufacturer, the world’s most popular pizza chain, and many more. Since its inception, Shipsy has been consistently helping manufacturers, FMCG businesses, food delivery providers, restaurant chains, D2C brands, on-demand delivery providers, express logistics companies, healthcare brands, retailers, and many more to optimize logistics costs and boost customer service.

Harsh Kumar, Chief Strategy Officer at Shipsy

Is the Shipsy platform a standalone solution or does it allow integration of customers’ existing applications?

Either way, it works perfectly! Our platform can seamlessly integrate with existing IT infrastructure. It can also be customized based on a customer’s unique needs and challenges to the greatest of degrees.

What are the competitive advantages an enterprise gets when it chooses Shipsy?

Technology adoption in the logistics industry is at a nascent stage. There are multiple solutions available in the market that only address specific parts of the entire ecosystem. Shipsy, on the other hand, delivers robust, data-driven, intelligent, and automated capabilities to improve logistics operations starting with export/import until a product is delivered to a customer’s doorstep. Also, we are not just technology providers but are partners to customers, and take immense pride in their growth.

Excellent. Beyond the product, what is the story of Shipsy? How did banking professionals come together to form a logistic platform?

That’s an interesting question. Even though we studied in different institutions, we had the same background — banking. At one point, we used to operate on a platform used by departments like finance, trading, sales, research, brokering, etc. It gave us the idea of creating a robust operating system to unify supply chain and logistics networks and all their stakeholders on a single platform.

Perhaps, it is simple only to define and there is a tough journey awaiting an e-commerce enterprise to become the trusted choice of a customer, who makes an important decision to purchase a product online or repeat the act.

There are a few proven approaches, including dynamic pricing, fast delivery, platform competency, and personalized marketing, that can influence customers’ decisions and help improve the customer experience and, eventually, the market share of the business.

The June issue of The Integrator evaluates the global e-commerce business in length. While the cover story appraises the role that customer experience plays in the success of an e-commerce business, expert interviews and features amplify the voice of tech, payment, logistics, and other service providers. You can read it here: https://issuu.com/varmea/docs/the_integrator_-_june_2022

The Integrator is planning to host “Virtual Roundtable Sessions 2022” on the topic “SECURITY THREAT FOR BFSI SECTOR IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ERA.” The sessions will participate information security professionals (i.e., CIOs, CISOs, CSOs) of reputed banks in the Middle East and senior executives/spokespersons from tech enterprises, and security solution service providers to discuss all such matters of security concern in BFSIs.

Simply write to m.muralidharan@omaemirates.com, showing your interest, if you are bearing any of these roles or capacities. We are excited to choose you as a participant and listen to your views on the subject.

Thank you for the support and we are excited to receive your feedback on the publication.

Happy reading!

Murali Margassery
Assistant Editor